Local SEO
Local SEO services that fill the calendar.
When someone nearby searches for what you do, Google shows a map with three businesses on it. Being one of those three is worth more to an owner-operator than almost anything else in marketing. That is the job: the profile, the map pack, the reviews, and the pages that hold it all up, worked every month.
Talk to JonAndersen’s calendar filled in four weeks.
Andersen Sports Massage had the same problem most owner-operators have: good work, real skill, and almost no way for a stranger nearby to find him. We took over the website and the Google Business Profile together, because separating them is what makes local SEO slow.
He was booked solid four weeks later. We are not going to dress that up with invented percentages. It is one business, in one city, in one trade, and your result depends on your competition and where you start. But the shape of it is the point: the profile and the site, worked as one job, aimed at the searches happening within a few miles of you.
Paul has let us publish what his Search Console shows, and the useful part of it is not a number.
His homepage sits in the map pack for “sports massage near me,” the search that actually describes what he does. That position comes from the Google Business Profile, not from publishing articles, which is why profile work leads every local engagement we run.
He also ranks first for “deep tissue massage” and gets almost nothing from it. That search is mostly spa intent, and Paul does clinical sports work, so the people seeing him there did not want what he sells. Position one for the wrong query is worth less than position three for the right one. It is the clearest argument we have for reporting booked work instead of rankings.
We are deliberately not putting impression and click counts beside those. A single-therapist practice in a Peninsula town is a small market, the numbers move with the season, and a count published without the date range behind it is not evidence of anything. When Paul is happy for us to share a full dated export, the real figures will go here.
What the monthly local SEO work covers.
Google Business Profile, managed
Categories first. Google says the categories you select affect your local ranking, and its own example is a pizza restaurant surfacing for Restaurants, Italian Restaurants and Pizza. Then services, photos, posts, answers to customer questions, and hours kept current. For a business that serves a city, the profile usually produces calls before the website does.
The map pack, worked deliberately
Relevance, distance, and prominence are the three things Google weighs. We cannot move you closer to the searcher, so we work the other two, hard.
Pages for the places you serve
Real pages about real service areas, written to be useful. Not fifty near-identical city pages with the town name swapped, which Google has treated as spam for years.
Consistent listings across the web
Name, address, and phone matching everywhere they appear, and duplicates removed. Wrong hours or an old address costs you the customer who acted on them, before it costs you anything in ranking. Google is explicit that complete and accurate information helps you show up at all.
A review engine that runs
A repeatable way to ask every customer, and responses to the ones that arrive. Reviews are the prominence lever you actually control.
Proof it is working
Profile performance, search rankings by area, and calls or bookings attributed back to the source. You should never have to take our word for it.
Relevance
How well your profile matches what they searched.
You control this. Categories, services, and a site that says what you do.
Distance
How far you are from the person searching.
You cannot change this. No tactic moves you closer.
Prominence
How well known your business is.
You earn this. Reviews, links, and mentions, over months.
Reviews are the part of prominence you actually control.
Google lists prominence as one of the three things deciding local rank, and names review count and score as part of it. The independent research says the same thing in money: reviews move purchase likelihood, and the rating moves revenue. Review work is not a nice-to-have on top of the profile. It is the profile.
- 270%
- higher purchase likelihood for something with five reviews than for the same thing with none. Most of the lift lands in the first handful.
- Spiegel Research Center, 2017
- 5–9%
- more revenue for every one-star increase in rating, in a study of Seattle restaurants where the effect landed on independents rather than chains. The rating is not a scoreboard, it is the top line.
- Harvard Business School, Luca
About local SEO packages.
Most agencies sell local SEO as a tiered package: so many citations, so many posts, so many pages per month. It is a tidy way to price work, and it is a poor way to fix a business, because the tier you need depends entirely on what is already broken.
A business with an unclaimed profile needs an afternoon of work and then patience. A business fighting four competitors in a dense city needs sustained effort for a year. Selling both the same package means overcharging one and underserving the other.
So our prices are public, and the plan you need follows from what is broken. JB starts at $500 a month and keeps your listing, reviews, and site looked after. More pages, links, and posts each month start at $1,500 a month, for businesses in a competitive area. For reference, the market commonly runs from a few hundred dollars a month for a simple single-location business up to $1,500-$3,000 a month with an established agency in a competitive city. Whoever you hire, make sure they have looked at your profile before they tell you which plan you need.
Start here if you want to do it yourself.
Genuinely: a lot of local SEO is within reach of an owner with a few focused hours. These are the five we send people to first.
- Why your business isn’t showing up on Google
Nine causes in the order worth checking them. Start here if you are invisible rather than outranked.
- Google Business Profile optimization, step by step
The field-by-field checklist, and the shortcuts that get profiles suspended.
- Google review link generator
Search your business. Get the review link, a QR code, and a button for your site. Free.
- How to get more Google reviews
When to ask, what to say, where to put the link, and the rules that get profiles in trouble.
- How to respond to Google reviews
Reply to good, bad, and fake reviews, with a free reply builder and a privacy mode for health, legal, and financial work.
Common questions.
- How much do local SEO packages cost?
- In the market ranges we see (not a survey, and not a Vertana quote), local SEO commonly runs a few hundred dollars a month for a single-location business at the low end, and $1,500-$3,000 a month or more with an established agency in a competitive city. Vertana's plans start at $500 a month with JB, which looks after your listing, reviews, and site, and more pages, links, and posts each month start at $1,500. Both are month to month. How much work your area needs depends on whether your profile is already claimed, how many locations you have, and how competitive your area is.
- How long does local SEO take?
- Google Business Profile changes can affect the map pack within weeks, which is why local work often shows results faster than general SEO. Competitive terms in a dense city still take months. Anyone promising the top of the map pack in 30 days is describing something Google does not sell.
- What is the difference between local SEO and regular SEO?
- Local SEO targets searches with geographic intent, where Google shows a map with three businesses above the normal results. Winning there depends on your Google Business Profile, proximity to the searcher, reviews, and local citations. Regular SEO targets the standard results and depends more on pages, content, and links.
- Do I need a physical address for local SEO?
- Not necessarily. Businesses that travel to customers can be set up as service-area businesses with the address hidden. What you cannot use is a virtual office, mailbox, or coworking address as though it were your location, which is a common cause of suspension.
- Can I do local SEO myself?
- Much of it, yes, and we publish the guides for exactly that reason. Claiming the profile, fixing categories, and asking for reviews are within reach of any owner. People usually hire it out when the work needs to happen consistently every month and there is no month where they have the time.
Local search is one part of the monthly SEO work, and it stands on the website underneath it. The named wellness proof on this page has its own lane at wellness websites and local SEO.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help, how local results are determined. Google's own description of relevance, distance, and prominence, its confirmation that prominence includes review count and quality, and its statement that businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local results. Source for the category and completeness claims on this page.
- Spiegel Research Center, Northwestern Medill, How Online Reviews Influence Sales (2017). Analysis of roughly 122,000 reviews across about 13,500 products, tracking page views and sales as each accumulated reviews. Source for the purchase-likelihood and conversion figures.
- Harvard Business School, Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com (Luca). Regression discontinuity study joining Yelp reviews to Washington State Department of Revenue restaurant data. Source for the revenue-per-star figure.
- Google Business Profile Help, manage your business category. Google's statement that the categories you select affect your local ranking on Google, and its worked example of a primary category surfacing a profile for related searches.
Find out where you actually stand locally.
Book a call and Jon will look at your profile, your map pack position for the searches that matter, and who is beating you and why.
Talk to JonBook a call. No pitch, just a look at your business.